Fashion

The Palestinian Revolution Isn’t Wrapped in Keffiyeh Anymore — It Wears Tracksuits

BYSalma Mousa

October 7, 2025

The views expressed in this article are those of Salma Mousa, a Palestinian voice writing from within Palestine. We believe in making space for lived perspectives from those directly affected and platforming their voices and opinions.
What do we look like outside the imagination of a European? Do we dare ask? For years, the common consensus in the globalized, Western (and predominantly white) world about Palestinians and their struggle for liberation has been romanticized as faceless, trivial, and unstoried: men gripping stones, draped in a patterned cloth, frozen mid-throw.

Although glamorized, that image is not entirely fabricated— it exists, or at least it did, almost twenty-five years ago. The struggle has since aged: settlements have expanded, oppression has become more systemic, and crowds have become more and more institutionalized. Yet, the image of Palestinians and their resistance seems frozen in adolescence. In reality, today, revolution isn’t keffiyeh-patterned; it’s Adidas-striped.

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This shift raises its own questions. Does the tracksuit dilute the revolution’s authenticity, or simply lay bare a harder truth? For now, it’s Palestinian youth who embody the fight, and they’re dressed in sportswear, not folklore.

Let me begin by asking: Who gets to fashion our struggle? Is it outsiders? Are we still colonized today, through fashion, by having the West assign us a costume no longer reflective of our lived reality? While the keffiyeh, for example, signals solidarity abroad, it no longer signals us. There is an insistence— a lazy and disconnected insistence—that our struggle must be recognizable, marketable, and that it must look like what the West fantasizes. But our freedom fighters today look otherwise, surviving, sometimes even barely against all odds, in a totally different attire than the one expected.

The demand for Palestinian “authenticity” has become colonial. We must look the part, and never simply just like ourselves. To insist that Palestinians must look a certain way is to deny us participation in a globalized present. We are denying Palestinians a future, even one that’s fractured and uncertain.

It’s not a myth that the keffiyeh has become a global symbol of the fight against oppression. However, it is one that Palestinians have discarded a while back. In fashionable terminology, the keffiyeh has been phased out; our manufacturers are producing three stripes instead.

Of course, there is an undeniable tension in naming the tracksuit as the uniform of today’s Palestinian struggle. On one hand, Adidas is a global corporation that has, at times, been scrutinized for its associations in the region and even called out by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement. On the other, its three stripes have become an unmistakable marker of resistance on the ground. This contradiction raises an important question: how does a symbol tied to a multinational brand also come to embody anti-colonial defiance?

To understand this paradox, one must surrender to the notion of survival, to a contradictory living, to the singularity of the Palestinians existence. Most of the time, we are alive, de-facto, on our own soil, forced to exist in areas controlled by Israeli authorities, or even worse, on fringes controlled by no one at all. A huge number of Palestinians are forced to work in the same settlements they can never legitimize, navigating checkpoints and infrastructures that serve to surveil, contain, and fragment them. Wearing an Adidas tracksuit, even counterfeit, becomes part of that same negotiation with survival: a choice that is reduced to what’s available, affordable, and endurable.

Life under occupation is inherently paradoxical: to resist is to exist, and to exist is to negotiate, sometimes even compromise, with who, and what, wants to erase you. The Adidas tracksuit in this context becomes an accurate representation of that duality, not for what it can stand for, but as a durable and accessible garment, reflective of youth in search of identity, mobility, and space in a place that denies them all three. Ironically, the brand built on the promise of movement is worn by those who are denied it. The tracksuit’s stretch fabric, on a Palestinian body, mocks freedom while simultaneously reinventing it, stitching it into polyester form.

Come to think about it, what better than a tracksuit to climb a concrete wall or run when chased by a military vehicle? It is our very own Palestinian Olympics, all days of the year. The ubiquitous tracksuit demands that we confront a living, evolving struggle. It portrays a reality that refuses simplifications, a small and yet telling signifier of a whole generation’s paradox: modern yet confined, global yet besieged, branded yet unseen.

Three stripes at a time, we cope. Three stripes at a time, we attempt to forge a way. Outside of the theatrics— the boycott calls, the solidarity, the international projections— we stand tall, striped, visible, even if it is just for seconds. We live not as archival posters but as keepers of a paradoxical, complicated, messy truth. Three stripes at a time, despite imagined “dress-to-impress” contests and faded “aesthetics,” we survive.

The Palestinian Revolution Isn’t Wrapped in Keffiyeh Anymore — It Wears Tracksuits

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The Palestinian Revolution Isn’t Wrapped in Keffiyeh Anymore — It Wears Tracksuits

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